The New Capitalism has become a Weltanschauung. It is no
longer content with the economy. It now seeks a corner on our
life and thought.

Capitalism has changed its face. The
elation of 1989 seems far behind, when
the collapse of the socialist camp was celebrated generally as
the triumph of the market economy. Only the conservative
sociologist Niklas Luhmann, himself not one to long
nostalgically for socialism, had no wish to speak of victory:
In his opinion, the most one might say was that the collapse
of socialism had preceded that of capitalism.

To argue with Luhmann over the prophetic quality of his
pronouncement is no longer possible, as he, in the meantime,
has died. Still it is certain that capitalism’s stock
throughout the world, and even in the Western countries of its
birth, has sunk dramatically. Equally certain, it has long
since ceased to be a problem only for the Left. All the
authors whom we queried in our series on the “Future of
Capitalism,” whether scientist, philosopher or writer, whether
from Europe, America or the Third World, whether conservative,
liberal of leftist, all were of the opinion that capitalism,
which had, for centuries, brought fabulous prosperity to the
West, could only be viewed today as a kind of threat.

Even the Entrepreneur Sees Himself a Victim

Even captains of
industry, making the rounds of the television talk
shows, anxiously shake their heads and assert--and
believably--that they are at the mercy of a free market, which
allows no leeway for their decision-making. They don’t want to
order mass layoffs, the return on capital demands it; they
don’t want to relocate factories abroad, but the competition
forces them to; they don’t want to shut companies or to gut
them, but the market with its remorseless fluctuations makes
this, unhappily, unavoidable.

This is an astonishing turn of events. Describing capitalism
as a system of inexorable compulsion used to be, rather, the
specialty of leftist critique. What is prompting businessmen
today to adopt the language of Marxist alienation as a
self-description? Is it merely a rhetorical trick for
deflecting personal responsibility onto the system? Or are
they beginning to feel themselves victims of that alienation
which consists in having to act otherwise than how one
actually wants to act?

The social philosopher Hartmut Rosa of the University of Jena
recently proposed a minimal definition of the classical
concept of Marxist alienation, which fits our contemporary
situation quite well: Whoever, operating in the capitalist
market, feels himself compelled, for his own survival, toward
some goal, which, outside the market, he would never seek. No
one wishes to destroy the environment, but the necessity of
cutting production costs compels him to do it; everybody would
like to help society’s under-dogs, but the necessity of
cutting social spending causes the State to place them beyond
the pale; everyone suffers from the hysterical progression of
technological innovations, but competition forces producers to
keep on manufacturing new products.

Now, this shrinking down to nothing of business’s range of
freedom used to be the classical argument which leftist
criticism leveled against the system. And so it wanted to see
the system toppled, since the blandishments of
social-democratic reform and moralistic appeals to legal
principles solved nothing. A good Marxist always knew that the
entrepreneur is not a bad person, only that he cannot act
otherwise than as the system dictates.

The traditional defenders of capitalism, however, contested
this characterization of the system, the language of
inexorable historical processes being, to them, nothing but a
flimsy construct of philosophy-of-history. They never would
have asserted that all political will and all political
morality must bow to the peculiar logic of capitalism.

And today? What has happened that social democrats, to whose
historical credit has always been the taming of capitalism,
hold it, meanwhile, to be a system that can no longer be
tamed? What has changed with the New Capitalism that it is
experienced as compulsion by its own supporters and
beneficiaries?

It is globalization. Here, then, the generally accepted, but
on closer examination, curious answer. For globalization, in
this context, denotes nothing other than the expansion of
market competition beyond national boundaries, to encompass
the world. The cheapest manufacturers of rich countries are
competing with the still cheaper manufacturers of poor
countries. This means, in the first instance, only that
capitalism has grown. Can it be that it has only changed its
face? Or is it that its expansion into underdeveloped
countries amounts to a reversion to an earlier phase of its
own development, one that now again conforms to the classical
Marxist description?

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that capitalism truly
is a system, which brings unavoidably all that it does bring
to mankind; its future prospects, then, don’t look good. For
it is not to be supposed that the citizens of the developed
countries, where capitalism has been tamed, will accept its
reversion to its untamed condition without resistance. The
founding of a German party of the Left outside the Social
Democratic Party, is only the first sign of a political
resistance, which, before long, could assume a
pre-revolutionary form.

Let us assume, contrariwise, that capitalism is no system, and
its effronteries not inevitable–what then? Then the talk of
the inexorable demands of the system would be the merest
ideology, akin to communist propaganda, only that this time,
it would be deployed by the champions of free markets and
carried forward by means of capital itself for the
intimidation of society and the steady rise of the rate of
return.

Market Law as Nature’s Law

This possibility might
seem, at first sight, suspiciously naïve. It has,
however, some surprising validations. Preeminent among them is
the superfluity of world-explanatory armor with which the new
ideologues appears bedecked on stage. In their effort to
immunize the market economy against every form of criticism,
they take a distinctive step that even surpasses Marx, in that
they treat the principle of competition as a quasi-Law of
Nature.

The rules governing free markets are, for them, not rules
which society has given itself (and which it can also take
away), but an eternal Force, comparable to the force of
gravity, against which it is senseless to protest. A nation,
which restricts economic competition domestically, will
therefore lose out in the competition between nations.

The New Economism explains all social phenomena in accordance
with this same pattern, even in the cultural sphere (the rise
and fall of artistic genres) and in education (the decline of
the classical Gymnasium.) In other words, the new market
ideology teaches a simpleminded kind of Darwinism. The
development of human culture realizes itself, in this
perspective, with no one at the wheel, like evolution.

Such an assertion of eternal laws by which the future can be
predicted is indeed, in the classic definition of Hannah
Arendt, the essential hallmark of all totalitarian movements.
One is absolved from every form of moral consideration, since
who will be the victim and who the victor has been determined
from the outset. The demise of those slated for destruction
[whose market positions are hurting] cannot be prevented, it
can only be accelerated; thus, in the case of National
Socialism, the destruction of the alleged racial inferiors
would be accelerated, as, with the Bolsheviks, would be the
destruction of the so-called dying classes.

This will-to-acceleration is a further characteristic of the
neo-capitalist ideologues, which they share with the
totalitarian movements of the past. They by no means wish it
to be seen by what means the victorious example of Western
business methods have spread across the earth, especially if
it was through free trade agreements advanced through
extortion, or, in the case of especially refractory nations,
through war. Nothing was more characteristic than the American
media’s triumphant yawp over the transistor-listening,
Coca-Cola drinking, gum-chewing Afghanis; it seemed, for a
moment, as if the original war aim, the liberation from a
terror-regime, paled utterly beside the victory of Western
consumer culture.

But only seemed so. For the capitalist ideology, the
liberation of the Afghanis actually arrives in tandem with
those products of which the people had traditionally been
deprived. This also connects the New Economism with the
totalitarian movements: It preaches, naturally, not only an
end to certain insults and injuries, but promises an end to
all insults and injuries. Its promise of freedom, democracy
and prosperity is by no means vouchsafed to all men, but only
to those who submit to the economic program that serves as the
source of all blessings.

This linking of the eternal with the incidental, of universal
human rights with the particulars of one modern economic
approach, and the erasure of democracy’s historical claim to
have existed prior to capitalism, signalize (as do all
distortions of the truth) the ideological character of
Economism. It has even tried to maintain that capitalism is,
in itself, already a democratic institution, insofar as the
consumer, with each purchase at the cash register, votes, and
the market, in its own self-interest, eschews discrimination.

This confident masking of conditions, which even in
dictatorships, capitalism has hitherto accomplished with
brilliance, and which even the Apartheid regime in South
Africa didn’t seriously impede, shows most clearly, perhaps,
that it is demagoguery that is operating here rather than
empire. The assertion that popular sovereignty is already
immanent in consumerism, is not too far from the Bolshevik
argument that held parliaments and the rule of law superfluous
given that true popular sovereignty was already established
with the common ownership of property.

And the propaganda of the Bush regime, in fact, conforms, as
it preaches the exporting of democracy – not, indeed, through
the creation of democratic institutions, at least not if these
do not entail unfettered economic competition. The American
effort to open all that was formerly State-organized and
controlled to the free market - including education, the water
supply, and transportation infrastructure - betrays what is
truly at issue: an Imperium that seeks to imprint its image
upon the entire world. Not just its democracy, but also its
economy and its way of life.

Private Enterprise’s War Against the State

The New Capitalism is a
totalitarian movement also in that it neither can nor
will come to rest until it has comprehended the entire earth,
and placed into private hands all that had once been subject
State or citizenry. This demonic will-to-self-replication and
the leveling of all differences stands exactly at the center
of Hannah Arendt’s famous study The Origins of Totalitarianism
(1955). Among these origins belongs the distinctive hostility
to the State exhibited by totalitarian ideologies, which, not
by accident, wish to see themselves not as parties but rather
as movements. All that is rule-bound, manageable and therefore
static must melt into air before the dynamic principle of the
Movement. All that is individual, traditional, culturally
specific and intractable must pass through Capitalism, as
through the purifying fires of Purgatory, to emerge in a world
that is uniform and redeemed.

The awkward thing, even for the true believer, is that can
never be specified when the Movement’s goals will have found
their fulfillment. “Those who march off to impose their image
upon the world cannot be satisfied with only a mediocre
portrait. The defective reflection of themselves will prompt
them tear up the copy, and begin again from scratch”, wrote
the Indian author Amitav Gosh in our series, and one could
continue with Hannah Arendt: “The unbounded process of an
endless accumulation of power, which offers and enjoys an
ever-renewed expansion for expansion’s sake, requires a
constant supply of new material in order to renew itself, and
not grind to a halt.” Or, once again, with Amitav Gosh: “The
melding of Capitalism and Imperium means a program of
permanent war – an idea which once intoxicated the Trotskyites
and which the neo-conservatives have now embraced with their
project for the New American Century.”

The point of this, if one may pursue the totalitarian analogy,
lies not in the satisfaction of ends, but the maintenance of a
state of constant uncertainty, so people can be kept from
developing the faculty of judgment, and thus kept from acts of
resistance. Herein lies the reason for the characteristic
anti-intellectualism of the New Capitalism, which seeks
everywhere to discredit potentially critical forms of high
culture, in favor of a vacuous mass entertainment (allegedly
because high culture can’t be competitive.) “The consistent
suppression of all the higher forms of intellectual activity
under the modern leaders of the masses has”, again according
to Hannah Arendt, “a deeper origin than the natural animosity
to all that one doesn’t understand. Total dominance can allow
no breathing room for free initiative. “

Similarly, the American sociologist Richard Sennett has
described, in our series, the paralysis of independent
initiative. “The new insecurity is not at all an unintended
outcome of an unstable market; it is programmed into the New
Capitalism. It is not an unwanted, but a desired element.” And
further: it is embedded deeply in the organizational structure
of the modern enterprise with its flat hierarchies constant
changes at the managerial level. “The continual purges, the
sudden ups and downs of work careers hinder any ability to
really learn the job at hand and the development of a secure
working-life experience” writes, no longer Richard Sennett on
the New Capitalism, but Hannah Arendt, again, on the Soviet
bureaucracy under Stalin.

Flat Hierarchies as an Element of Total
Domination

The advantages are
obvious of such a structure in which “finally, there
are no remaining intermediate levels between the Leader and
the ruled”: “In the absence of any secure hierarchy, the
dictator remains absolutely independent of his subordinates,
and can execute at any time the extraordinarily rapid twists
and turns of his policies.” Let one substitute “CEO” for
“leader” (or “dictator”) and “business plan” for “policies”
and one has a rather exact picture of a company, which, true
to the ideals of “shareholder value,” can be market-flexible,
that is, it can operate nimbly, at will, and without any
concern for colleague or customer.

With this sinister, organizational change, which has moved the
production facilities of the New Capitalism itself to where
they border on the totalitarian movements, we can perhaps
bring our conspectus to a close. The parallels are obvious.
They do raise the question of why capitalism, which,
throughout its history, has more or less managed to get by
without hectoring and the ideological promising of panaceas,
must, in the home stretch, seek refuge in crude propaganda
lies and utopian manifestoes.

Some date the turn-around from 1989 and the end of socialist
challengers who had forced capitalism to assume a human face.
And has it now cast off the mask? With equal justice it might
be said that it has only now put on the ferocious mask. This
wouldn’t have happened in 1989, then, but with the market
crash of 2000 and the attack of Islamic fundamentalism on the
World Trade Center, when it would have been apparent that
capitalism, also, could collapse, or had, at any rate internal
as well as external enemies, who were not to be placated with
fine words alone. It wouldn’t be the first example in history
of an imperial system, which, feeling threatened, turns
vicious, posing a danger to civilized humanity.

This article originally appeared in the German weekly, Die Zeit
and was translated from the German by Jeff Craig Miller.